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Kerr Borland

The information on this page is partly gathered from sources which may not be reliable.

Kerr Borland was a co-founder of Nascom with John Marshall. He was responsible for sales and marketing.

Kerr Borland may have left Nascom early in 1979 a mere two years after it was founded.

In 1980 he set up a company of his own called Specialist Micro Designs (SMD). It was a small contract manufacturer for the design of microcomputers and peripherals.

At the end of 1980, and in another rapid shift of focus, he set up Arfon Microelectronics Ltd. That company is listed as having an address on the Cibyn Industrial Estate, Caernarfon, LL55 2BD. The new company may have benefited from investment by the Welsh Development Agency.

The idea was to design and distribute peripherals for all of the main home computers emerging at the time, including Apple, Pet, Tandy and Nascom.

As one learns about the history of Nascom, it is not clear to me that the founders were committed to the long term success of the computer, and this may have contributed to its short but bright life. Compare this UK approach with that taken by the founders of Apple Computer.

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About NASCOM

The Nascom 1 and 2 were single-board computer kits issued in 1977 and 1979, respectively, based on the Zilog Z80 and including a keyboard and video interface, a serial port that could be used to store data on a tape cassette using the Kansas City standard, and two 8-bit parallel ports. To minimize cost, the buyer had to assemble a Nascom by hand-soldering about 3,000 joints on the single circuit board.

Z80

"The Z80 was an improved implementation of the Intel 8080 architecture, which was faster, more capable, and much cheaper; alongside the 6502 it was one of the most popular 8-bit processors for general purpose microcomputers and other applications. It was used in the Nintendo Game Boy, the Sinclair ZX80, ZX81, ZX Spectrum and the Amstrad CPC home computers as well as the MSX architecture and the Tandy TRS-80 series—among many others. More so than simply sparking improvements in the budding field of home computing and gaming, the Z-80 also sparked a revolution in electronic music, as the first truly programmable polyphonic synthesizers (as well as their peripherals) relied heavily on implementations of this CPU." --- Wikipedia